Linux Unix BSD

Linux Unix BSD

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Optimizing Servers and Processes for Speed with ionice, nice, ulimit

To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.

· CPU  ·  RSS | 1:41 AM

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Windows Optimization – Intense Part II

If you ever wanted to know the best way to defragment and speed up your Windows-Based PC, I mean you really wanted to know, here is the 2nd part to my article on Windows Speed Optimizing that details the process I have found works really well. Definately not a quick process, and certainly not the best ever, just my best ever and one that you only have to do once to get the benefits.
This article has a lot of incredibly useful (and FREE) tools I recommend, which you can grab and use without reading the article..

· MyDefrag  ·  RSS | 9:42 AM

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Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks

The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.

Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..

· config  ·  RSS | 3:23 AM

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Protecting Files with Advanced Mod_Rewrite Anti-Hotlinking

If you have files on your site that you don’t want indexed by malicious search engines, grabbed and leeched by malicious spammers, or stolen and made available elsewhere, you can use mod_rewrite to drastically reduce or totally reduce that activity.

· stop hotlinkers  ·  RSS | 1:09 AM

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Crazy Advanced Mod_Rewrite Tutorial

Note: Extremely ILL Content
Find the key to unlocking mod_rewrite and you WILL be sick.. sick with a diamond disease on your wrist!

· mod_rewrite  ·  RSS | 12:55 PM

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Custom bash_profile for Advanced Shell Users

Want to get started with my custom bash file without reading this page (recommended as page is not updated)? Execute the following in your shell and rock and roll.

curl -O http://z.askapache.com/askapache-bash-profile.txt && . askapache-bash-profile.txt

· profile  ·  RSS | 2:32 PM

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An AskApache Plugin Upgrade to Rule them All

So my blog as been rather quiet for almost a year now, and very few updates if any have been released for my Password Protection PLugin, my Google 404 Plugin, and definately not for my AskApache CrazyCache plugin, which I will be releasing last… So for all of you who’ve helped me out by sending me suggestions and notifying me of errors and sticking with it… Just wanted to say sorry about that, and thanks for all the great ideas.. Well, I’ve been sticking with it as well believe it our not. I manage to get free days once in a while, and then its time to jam.

· Google 404 Plugin  ·  RSS | 1:59 PM

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The Right to Read

The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as “trusted computing” and “palladium”. We call it “treacherous computing”, because the effect is to make your computer obey companies instead of you. This was implemented in 2007 as part of Windows Vista; we expect Apple to do something similar. In this scheme, it is the manufacturer that keeps the secret code, but the FBI would have little trouble getting it.

· battle  ·  RSS | 4:48 PM

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PHP and AJAX shell console

Ever wanted to execute commands on your server through php? Now you can. I’m calling this file (see below) shell.php and it allows you to run commands on your web server with the same permissions that your php executable has.

· AJAX  ·  RSS | 9:01 PM

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DNS Round Robin Configuration using Rsync over SSH

The goal is to add the HostGator server to be an exact mirror of the z.askapache.com domain, then to add that server as a 2nd A record to my DNS zone. That way half the visitors to the size will be taking up resources and bandwidth on the HostGator server instead of mine.

Round Robin A records in DNS are intended to evenly distribute queries between each host of the same name. Using some tricks straight out of a hackers toolbox we can verify if the distribution is taking place. (It is.)

RSS | 1:46 AM

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Mirroring an Entire Site using Rsync over SSH

Sometimes there is an urgent need for creating an exact duplicate or “mirror” of a web site on a separate server. This could be needed for creating Round Robin Setups, Load-Balancing, Failovers, or for just plain vanilla backups. In the past I have used a lot of different methods to copy data from one server to another, including creating an archive of the whole directory and then using scp to send the file over, creating an archive and then encrypting it and then sending that file over using ftp, curl, etc., and my persistence at learning new ways to do things has paid off because now I use rsync to keep an exact replica of the entire directory on an external server, without having to use all the CPU and resources of other mirroring methods.

· ssh  ·  RSS | 7:40 AM

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Ultimate Htaccess Tutorial for .htaccess files

This is not an introduction to .htaccess… This is the evolution of .htaccess… The BEST, the ORIGINAL, the NEWEST, and the most HIGHEST, FLYEST .htaccess tricks I can find.

Originally known as the “Ultimate .htaccess Guide”, its changed over the years by adding new .htaccess tricks and .htaccess examples to it.. I also add my favorite .htaccess links, the best .htaccess articles on AskApache, the coolest .htaccess experiments, the Web’s best .htaccess hacks, and update this article on the regular.

· .htaccess  ·  RSS | 9:05 AM

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Chmod, Umask, Stat, Fileperms, and File Permissions

Unix file permissions are one of the more difficult subjects to grasp.. Well, ok maybe “grasp” isn’t the word.. Master is the right word.. Unix file permissions is a hard topic to fully master, mainly I think because there aren’t many instances when a computer user encounters them. I’ve done a lot of research on it the past couple weeks… and now here’s everything I’ve learned so far.. cuz you guys AskApache Regs Rock!

· File  ·  RSS | 6:16 AM

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Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management

Learn how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and create a low-maintenance website the AskApache way. I’m piecing together all the hacks, tricks, methods, and ideas discussed throughout this blog and all across Netdom and glueing them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, crazy fastest, and best website setup I can think of.

· web host  ·  RSS | 8:45 PM

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SEO Secrets of AskApache Part 2

This is part II of the Advanced SEO used on AskApache.com Series and describes how to control which urls are indexed by Search Engines and how to move them higher up in Search Results.

· SEO  ·  RSS | 5:44 PM

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Serve External Javascript Files locally for Increased Speed

One way I speed up AskApache.com is by downloading external third-party javascript files to host on my own server instead of externally. In addition to the obvious speed boost, this lets you configure the caching and compression settings for the files.

· caching  ·  RSS | 2:55 AM

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Mod_Rewrite Variables Cheatsheet

We’ve figured out what mod_rewrite variables look like, a cheatsheet of the actual value.

· htaccess  ·  RSS | 1:05 AM

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Online Tool compares Packer, JSMin, Dojo, and YUI Compressor

· gzip  ·  RSS | 10:12 PM

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Pimp out your FeedBurner Count

I’ve had a lot of people ask about the FeedBurner FeedCount image on AskApache. Specifically how to set it up with custom messages and different colors each page view… It is pretty sweet..

· Count  ·  RSS | 4:50 AM

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Elite Log File Scrolling with Color Syntax

Scrolls the latest log entries for multiple log files to the current screen or to any other monitor or TTY in color using syntax highlighting, making debugging easier and saving a lot of time for multi-monitor workstations.

· color  ·  RSS | 12:56 AM

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Encrypted WordPress / phpBB Backups

Enter your DOMAIN_ROOT and the location of your wp-config.php or config.php, and this script finds all the mysql settings by parsing the phpbb or wordpress config file, then creates GPG encrypted backups, and saves your settings for future automation.

· wordpress  ·  RSS | 12:28 PM

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Fsockopen Power Plays

PHP’s fsockopen function lets you open an Internet or Unix domain socket connection for connecting to a resource, and is one of the most powerful functions available in the php language.

· socket  ·  RSS | 7:42 AM

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Automated Folder Backup Shell-Script

This simple unix shell script automatically creates backups of a specific folder at regular hourly, nightly, weekly, and monthly intervals. Instead of the usual method for copying directory trees using tar with fifo, pipes, rsync, or NFS methods this script uses cpio which is much much faster and has cool options like saving m/a/c times, symlinks, relative paths, and weird file names.

· cpio  ·  RSS | 1:22 AM

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Search And Replace shell script helpful for Upgrades

Search all files in a directory, replacing all occurances of string with a replacement string.

· search and replace  ·  RSS | 1:09 AM

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Faster Form Submission and Processing with fsockopen

Part II: Example illustrating how to speed up GET/POST form submissions. Uses fsockopen to initiate a server-side background request to process the submitted data, so that the result page of the form is displayed to the client lightningly quick.

· Submission  ·  RSS | 11:18 PM

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Faster POST and GET Form Submissions

Just a very brief look at speeding up form submission by delegating the processing and bandwidth to your server, not your client.

· fsockopen  ·  RSS | 10:21 PM

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Speed Up Google Analytics, use local ga.js

Host Google Analytics ga.js file locally for increased speed! Makes web pages load faster.

RSS | 8:35 AM

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Firefox Adsense WordPress Plugin

If your WordPress blog uses AdSense, and you love Firefox you will love this plugin. When a user downloads and installs Firefox through your referral, we’ll credit your account with up to $1.00 (more details).

· google  ·  RSS | 8:33 PM

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Apache Environment Variables CGI Script

My improved version of the common printenv / test-cgi scripts for debugging Apache environment variables set in .htaccess files

RSS | 11:40 AM

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Story by Author of PING for UNIX

Yes, it’s true! I’m the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about. :-)

· darpa  ·  RSS | 1:23 AM

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If you can crash your daemon, you likely have a security problem

Tons of awesome tips and tricks using netcat. Port redirector, nessus wrapper, capture exploits being sent by vuln scanners, etc. This is very useful for doing stuff like redirecting traffic through your firewall out to other places like web servers and mail hubs, while posing no risk to the firewall machine itself.

RSS | 3:11 PM

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Freshen your Anti-virus, Anti-Rootkits, and Anti-Spyware

I’ve tried 100’s of Anti-virus, Anti-Rootkit, and Anti-Spyware tools over the last 10 years, but it’s always good to re-examine your system’s security every couple of months.

· anti-virus  ·  RSS | 12:42 AM

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WordPress RewriteRules Viewer

Often I am programming a plugin, or modifying my .htaccess rules, or editing a WordPress template file and I get stuck when it comes to how WordPress rewrites url’s internally. This simple plugin displays all the internal WordPress rewrites.

RSS | 4:07 PM

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Speed Tips: Use Multiple SubDomains

To make your site even faster, serve certain content from different subdomains. The reason this works is amazingly cool!

RSS | 7:50 PM

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Wget Trick to Download from Restrictive Sites

Before

After trick
I am often logged in to my servers via SSH, and I need to download a file like a WordPress plugin. I’ve noticed many sites now employ a means of blocking robots like wget from accessing their files. Most of the time they use .htaccess to do this. So a permanent workaround has wget mimick a normal browser.

RSS | 11:26 AM

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Troubleshooting Apache .htaccess Authentication

Apache Web Server users have problems getting Apache Authentication/password-protection in htaccess working, this is a troubleshooting guide to get Password Protection working!

· htpasswd  ·  RSS | 5:44 AM

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Want to know how to really hack?

An interesting post by a computer hacker explaining how to really hack.

RSS | 3:08 PM

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Custom Webmaster Shell Environment

Webmasters often use SSH to remotely admin web sites and servers, learn how to make your shell colorful and powerful using my sample .bash_profile and you can be up and running in 30 seconds!

· alias  ·  RSS | 2:17 PM

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Install multiple OS Without Cds

I had a CD-RW drive but being a struggling computer security researcher I had no money for blank cd-recordables. What follows is how I managed to install various operating systems on my computer (1 hard drive) without having to burn to a CD the ISO and then boot from that.

· dual-boot  ·  RSS | 1:06 AM

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Custom PHP.ini tips and tricks

RSS | 6:51 PM

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Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; its underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.

The Linux kernel was first released to the public on 17 September 1991, for the Intel x86 PC architecture. The kernel was augmented with system utilities and libraries from the GNU project to create a usable operating system, which later led to the alternate term GNU/Linux. Linux is now packaged for different uses in Linux distributions, which contain the sometimes modified kernel along with a variety of other software packages tailored to different requirements.

Predominantly known for its use in servers, Linux has gained the support of corporations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Novell, and is used as an operating system for a wide variety of computer hardware, including desktop computers, supercomputers, and embedded devices such as mobile phones and routers.

Unix

Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit organizations.

As of 2007, the owner of the trademark UNIX® is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX®" (others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like").

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Unix's influence in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (particularly of the BSD variant, originating from the University of California, Berkeley) by commercial startups, the most notable of which is Sun Microsystems. Today, in addition to certified Unix systems, Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD derivatives are commonly encountered.

Sometimes, "traditional Unix" may be used to describe a Unix or an operating system that has the characteristics of either Version 7 Unix or UNIX System V.

BSD

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the 1970s. The term "BSD" is often non-specifically used to refer to any of the BSD descendants of today (e.g. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD).

BSD is one of several branches of Unix operating systems. Another one is evolved from UNIX System V developed by AT&T's Unix System Development Labs. A third consists of the GNU/Linux operating systems which draw from both Unix System V and BSD, as well as Plan9, and non-UNIX operating systems.

BSD was widely identified with the versions of Unix available for workstation-class systems. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies during the 1980s. This familiarity often came from using similar systems—notably DEC's Ultrix and Sun's SunOS—during their education. While BSD itself was largely superseded by the System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s (both of which incorporated BSD code), in recent years modified open source versions of the codebase (mostly derived from 4.4BSD-Lite) have seen increasing use and development.

OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995. The project is widely known for the developers' insistence on open source code and quality documentation; uncompromising position on software licensing; and focus on security and code correctness. The project is coordinated from de Raadt's home in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Its logo and mascot is Puffy, a pufferfish.

OpenBSD includes a number of security features absent or optional in other operating systems and has a tradition of developers auditing the source code for software bugs and security problems. The project maintains strict policies on licensing and prefers the open source BSD licence and its variants—in the past this has led to a comprehensive licence audit and moves to remove or replace code under licences found less acceptable.

As with most other BSD-based operating systems, the OpenBSD kernel and userland programs, such as the shell and common tools like cat and ps, are developed together in a single source repository. Third-party software is available as binary packages or may be built from source using the ports collection.

The OpenBSD project currently maintains ports for 17 different hardware platforms, including the DEC Alpha, Intel i386, Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC, AMD AMD64 and Motorola 68000 processors, Apple's PowerPC machines, Sun SPARC and SPARC64-based computers, the VAX and the Sharp Zaurus.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) PC compatible systems (including the Microsoft Xbox[1]), and also DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC and NEC PC-98 architectures. Support for the ARM and MIPS architectures are under development.

FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to other free operating systems such as Linux where the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately and packaged together by other groups as Linux distributions.

As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust, and of the operating systems that accurately report uptime remotely,[2] FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft's list[3] of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime. A long uptime also indicates that no crashes have occurred and that no kernel updates have been deemed necessary, as installing a new kernel requires a reboot and resets the uptime counter of the system.

NetBSD

NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-derivative BSD computer operating system. It was the second open source BSD variant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. Noted for its portability and quality of design and implementation, it is often used in embedded systems and as a starting point for the porting of other operating systems to new computer architectures.